The boot up on that Slate was at least twice as long as the iPad.
(He kept remarking how fast it was)
The browser he was using seemed to have a delay from the time he touched it to the time it scrolled
(he kept saying how responsive it was.)

However there were flash ads running all over the site he was on, that undoubtedly slowed it.

Finally, that keyboard button is a serious pain when compared to the intuitive keyboard on the iPad.

If that`s the real Slate AND it`s close to the final product(which I`d assume it was considering timing) then Apple doesn`t have a thing to worry about.

Interesting. Its a prototype, so hopefully, there will be improvements. A few observations...

The boot up was from a completely off state. Try completely powering off your iPad and see how quick it comes back up. Win7 has a hibernate or standby capability that should be much faster than a full boot up. I dont think its impossible for them to have instant on even.

The thickness is very comparable to the iPad - maybe even thinner. Did you know the iPad is almost 1in thick? It is in the middle - the tapered edges give the illusion of it being thinner.

Scrolling in the browser looked terrible. It was misinterpreting scrolling vs highlighting sometimes. I cant imagine they would ship it like that. Its completely unusable. HP already has touch screen all-in-one desktops that have very nice, smooth touch scrolling. Not sure what was going on there because HP clearly knows how to do it already in Windows.

As for the keyboard, it also works like the ipad, when you tap a text field, a floating keyboard pops up automatically. This is already in Tablet PCs on the market. I assume the button is there when you want to manually control it. I have had occaisions on the iPad where the keyboard doesnt pop up when it should (webforms, etc) A hardware button would be handy for that.

At the very minimum, it needs some kind of launcher overlay. Microsoft has already worked on similar projects with great results. They had a project called Origami that looked very promising a while back that was a mobile overlay to windows. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/umpc/demo.mspx I am very surprised to not see something like that on this HP.

I guess we will have to wait and see what actually ships when its done. I still believe a full desktop OS is doable and valuable in a slate tablet. Being able to install any Windows software would be a big deal without depending on developers to make special versions for your device.

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